Many businesses provide back office services, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, for employees. These applications typically use and store confidential and proprietary company information, such as financial data, contact information, and personnel files. Businesses limit access to these applications and the associated information to authorized users only.
When users are on-site, a business can authenticate users who access back office services via an enterprise network. However, when users are off-premises, it becomes more difficult to authenticate users and to provide services in a secure manner To maintain security, users who need to access back office services via a mobile client, such as a smartphone or tablet, must be authenticated as authorized before being allowed to perform actions exposed by the services.
For example, many companies use expense reporting systems to reimburse employees for expenses which they incur for business purposes and time reporting systems to capture employee hours. One of the challenges for employees is tracking the various expenses incurred for business purposes and hours worked on company business, particularly when expenses are incurred when the employee is away from his or her computer. In prior systems, employees needed to use some other process, such as saving paper receipts and logging hours worked, to keep track of expenses and time. Those expenses were then added to an expense report, and the time entries filed on a time card.